


je ne puis demeurer loin de toi plus longtemps

by Silvereye



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Angst, Comfort Sex, F/M, Grief/Mourning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-29
Updated: 2020-07-29
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:35:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,729
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25595887
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Silvereye/pseuds/Silvereye
Summary: Sebastien leaves the hospital and returns to the apartment he and his companions lease in a daze. It’s not that he does not know where he is going. It’s the finality: there is nowhere else to go.Booker comes back after seeing his son. Andy understands something of it.
Relationships: Andy | Andromache of Scythia/Booker | Sebastien le Livre
Comments: 18
Kudos: 81





	je ne puis demeurer loin de toi plus longtemps

**Author's Note:**

> Title from _[Demain dès l'aube](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demain_d%C3%A8s_l%27aube)_ by Victor Hugo, which is the saddest French poem I know and also fits Booker oddly well. The line in question means "I cannot stay away from you any longer".

Sebastien leaves the hospital and returns to the apartment he and his companions lease in a daze. It’s not that he does not know where he is going. It’s the finality: there is nowhere else to go.

Sebastien’s son hates him for not being able to share his immortality. None of his children had time to have children of their own. His son is the last of his family and when he dies Sebastien is left as a branch without green shoots. Forever, or near as.

Nothing to do now but to stick with the others.

The apartment is empty. Sebastien contemplates going back out and buying a bottle of cheap and terrible wine. Maybe two bottles. Maybe six.

A church bell rings somewhere. Half past – half past what? He hasn’t paid attention, but he’s aware, distantly, that he’s been contemplating the idea of wine much longer than he should have. So. No wine then, not if he can’t make his limbs move.

After another interminable span of time he manages to settle in one of the chairs in the front room. It will fool none of his friends, but maybe he can fool himself into believing he’s just sitting watch. Watches end. He’ll come back to himself when this one does.

Anne – Andromachée arrives first. She’s wearing a dress. That’s unusual. She usually passes as a man, which does seem sensible, given their occupation. Most people don’t think women wage war, or if they’ve seen incontrovertible evidence they immediately say women shouldn’t.

Maybe there was a contact who had preferred to speak to a woman.

Anne gets out of her boots (left by the door), her bonnet (hung on a nail in the wall) and her dress (thrown over the back of another chair). Sebastien realizes he’s staring. It’s unconscious, mostly; his eyes are drawn to movement and she is moving. He has already seen her in much less clothing, because their clothes have no skill for healing after a battle and the other three have little modesty left, anyway.

Anne walks past him, pokes at the stove, starts a new fire, puts the kettle on. It does boil, eventually. She makes tea and gets out two cups.

"Went to the hospital?" she asks, handing him one.

He nods. Sips. Scalds his mouth, of course, but what in the name of God does that matter.

Anne draws up another chair and sits by him, their knees touching. She doesn’t ask anything more and that’s compassion enough.

"Do you ever forget?" he asks.

She leans back in her chair, considering. Sebastien looks at her, the way she manages to seem steadier than a mountain and more assured than anyone in the world even when she’s slouched in a rickety chair that probably shouldn’t be balanced on only two legs, wearing an old petticoat and a mended bodice over a chemise.

"Yes," she says. "If you live long enough you forget everything."

It sounds like mercy. It sounds like damnation – if this is what Sebastien must remember of his son then he will. Better shame than nothing at all.

"I wish I could do something," he says.

"I know."

She lets the chair fall back onto all four legs. He rests his forehead against her shoulder and exhales shakily. She puts an arm around his shoulders, warm and solid. If he could cry he would now. But he cannot.

He’s so very tired. He’s so angry, in that distant place where most of his heart has gone, and he doesn’t even know at what exactly. Himself? God who has made him immortal but did not deign to spare the same skill for his children? Someone else altogether? He cannot tell.

He turns his head a little and meets Anne’s steady gaze. He wonders what she sees in his eyes.

There’s this daydream he occasionally entertains. Nicolas and Joseph so obviously have each other, Anne had Quynh. Maybe the immortals come in matched pairs somehow. Maybe one day he’ll find someone who cannot fall ill and die so long before him. He knows how foolish a daydream it is, is reminded of the gaping flaw in it every times he dreams of Quynh under the sea, but he cannot banish it for long.

Maybe one day he won’t be so terribly alone.

Or maybe his match was the one dead immortal, Lykon, and he died very long before Sebastien.

It’s not Anne. He knows that. But the symmetry remains: Nicolas and Joseph have each other, he and Anne are alone.

Anne twists a little, puts down her teacup. Her hand carries its heat when she lays it on his cheek and his eyes fall closed. He sighs.

"I’ve found fighting helps with grief," she says. "Can’t think of anything else during a battle. Digging a ditch does, too. Hauling crates up a mountainside. Anything that gets you out of your thoughts into your body."

"Anything?" he says, and feels some small flicker of amusement.

"Sure," she says.

He lifts his head from her shoulder. She keeps her hand on his cheek, rubbing small circles with her thumb.

"I am not in love with you," he says, stupidly, because it does come to mind.

"I know." She kisses him anyway, brief and sharp, and draws back, gauging his reaction. "That is not what this would be about."

"Alright," he says and kisses back. He’s more gentle than Anne, initially, but then she bites his lip almost hard enough to draw blood. There’s a savage brightness in her eyes, something he’s previously only glimpsed when she’s fighting with Joseph or Nicolas.

He stands up. She follows, so graceful that he never actually has to let go of her, and kisses him again, with less teeth this time. He embraces her closer, feels the strength and heat of her back under his hands and oh, he wants.

They make it to the bedroom, but no further. She’s unbuttoned his waistcoat and shirt with ruthless efficiency, he’s made some progress with the laces of her bodice. She kicks the door closed behind them and pushes him against it and he groans a little, because that has not happened in – ever, really.

Anne does not seduce like anyone who’s ever seduced him before. If it even can be called that. But he’s not complaining. It means he can’t be reminded of anyone else, either.

She kisses his throat, almost hard enough to bruise. He draws the laces of her bodice through another pair of holes. She murmurs against his throat: "This is going to take you forever, isn’t it?" but he can hear her smile.

"That’s not a problem for us, is it?" he says and almost chokes on the end of the sentence, because how can he joke when –

"No," she agrees. "I’m just not that patient in bed."

"We aren’t in a bed."

She presses closer, her hip against his groin, and says: "They really should have named you Sebastien le Pédant."

He laughs, short and loud, because it isn’t all that funny, and turns them around, so that Anne’s back is against the door. "Precision is a virtue," he says between kisses.

"It is?"

Sebastien slides a hand under her petticoat, between her legs. Her breath catches, hot and wet against his neck. She starts to unbutton his trousers with one hand. "Convincing," she says.

He doesn’t answer, instead focusing on the rhythm of her breathing, the way it changes with every little adjustment of his fingers. She hums in the back of her throat when he kisses her shoulder and so he does that again, working faster, until she comes, muffling a word against his neck.

It takes her only a few moments to catch her breath. Then she finishes unbuttoning his trousers, pushes them down a little, hitches one leg around his hip.

"Wouldn’t that be dangerous?" he asks. Hands are fine, mouths would be, but this might have consequences he couldn’t bear to face.

"I’ve never conceived a child," she says, drawing him closer with a very well-placed hand. "I don’t intend to do so in the future. Trust me."

"I do," he says. She grinds against him, hard. He adjusts her petticoat, already half hitched up, and gets his hands around her thighs and lifts. She’s – about as heavy as he expected, given her height and soldier’s build, but he does have to adjust her grip a little, even when she grips his waist with her thighs. She smiles, again with that savage light in her eyes. He thinks he smiles back. He certainly kisses back.

She hums again when he enters her. He tries to bury his face in her neck, because oh God it has been so long, but she gets a hand in his hair and when he doesn’t immediately comply, she pulls a little. He makes an embarrassing little sound, something between a sob and a sigh, which she catches in her mouth. She puts her other arm around his neck and loosens her grip on his hair and jerks her hips a little.

"Come on," she whispers.

So he does. He fucks her, slow at first and then faster, adjusts his grip again to get one hand free and between them. She holds on to him, her forehead almost against his, their breaths mingling. She doesn’t close her eyes, except for one moment near the end, and he can’t but hold her gaze until the very end, when he sees light behind his closed eyelids.

His knees buckle. She gets one of her feet on the floor, which is at least half of why they don’t simply fall over. They do end in something of a heap, he on his knees and she sitting half on him, half on the floor. She lets go of his hair and he makes another embarrassing sound at the loss. But she has let go only to take his face between her hands, and to kiss his forehead, and to rub her thumbs over his cheeks.

They’re wet. He wonders when he started crying.

He doesn’t know what to say. Thank you is far too imprecise. I’m sorry would be inane. I love you is – not correct, not like that.

"You’ll live," she says, and for a brief bright while it feels like a benediction, not a curse.


End file.
